In 1984, with the revamped Clash falling apart around him, Joe Strummer went to Spain and stayed there for several months. In most bio treatments, this generally gets a few pages or a couple minutes of film – a disappearance viewed through the prism of what it meant to Strummer’s band, his career, his mental health. But that sojourn to southern Spain was no lark – it had roots in Strummer’s pre-Clash life, created lasting ties with Spanish musicians, and deepened a bond with the country that lasted until his sudden death at age 50, 10 years ago this month.

They know about this stuff in Granada, where Strummer produced an album by local punk band 091, and where a Facebook campaign to name a street after him has gained political support. In the rest of the world, though, not so much. After the punk icon’s passing, Nick Hall, a UK-born filmmaker and Clash fan who has lived in Barcelona since the mid ’90s, started digging up stories of Strummer’s time in Spain – the most obscure and outlandish of which was the tale of the missing Dodge, a vintage American muscle car Strummer once told a radio interviewer he’d parked in a Madrid garage and never found again.

With that metaphorically rich anecdote in hand, Hall embarked on I Need a Dodge!, a music documentary that sees the filmmaker trying to track down Joe’s missing car while filling in the personal and artistic blanks of a place and time that saw Strummer begin pulling away from the Clash. We spoke to Hall briefly during his IndieGoGo campaign for the film, which brought in close to $10,000 for finishing costs (you can still donate via PayPal, and collect perks, through the film’s website); he’s now pulling together a final edit, from which he took a break to give us a more detailed view of why he took up Joe Strummer’s Spanish story.

MFW: There have been a lot of films made and books written about Joe Strummer and the Clash. Other than the little-known bit about the car, what is your film going to add to the canon? What is it going to tell us about Joe that we don’t know, and that we want to know?

Nick Hall: In terms of the story that I’m telling, there’s not a lot been said about it, so I think there’s room, purely on a superficial level, for the anecdotes and tales to be told of what he got up to. This episode was overshadowed by the fact that these were the last days of the Clash, but it’s kind of Joe’s first arrival at the crossroads, to keep the car metaphor going. He’s realized the magnitude of his error in sacking Mick Jones and believing [Clash manager] Bernie Rhodes. He sided with the wrong guy. This kicks off what’s now termed the wilderness years, which is quite a long period in his life – probably between the Clash and the Mescaleros. And this is the first, in inverted commas, “post-Clash project,” when he launches the album production in Spain.

I like it [laughs]. I don’t think there’s a great deal more to it than that. You’ve got to feel a great amount of sympathy for a story, I think, to take it on. I suppose there’s an element of – I don’t want to make too much of it, but I’m English and I’m living in Spain. Julien Temple could only get so far in Spain trying to tell that part of the story. [Strummer biographer] Chris Salewicz would only get so far. They spoke to one or two guys in Granada about Joe’s Spanish adventure, but yeah, it’s a footnote. I don’t intend it to stand up against any of those weighty tomes that have been published. [When] you’re investigating a documentary, unless you get the job of telling Tom Waits’s life story or whatever, it’s, “OK, I’ll dig around a bit and see what I come up with.” It might come to nothing.

It was when I got the tape, this great interview on Spanish radio, where he’s attempting to speak Spanish to a Spanish presenter, and he’s saying that if anyone knows where my car is, I’ve been several times to Madrid, I really want to find it. It’s a very powerful symbol, a car, especially a vintage car. It was a great trigger to tell the story. I had this image in my head of Joe Strummer going off to dig up [Spanish poet and radical Federico Garcia] Lorca and discovering – the contrast would be huge. It’s difficult to imagine now, the contrast between the life with the Clash – he’d been playing in Shea Stadium – compared with life in Andalucia in 1984.

Spain was still pretty poor at that point.

Very poor, yeah. Very high unemployment. Similar to 2012, but a lot poorer. They hadn’t come off the back of a construction boom then. I’ve always been attracted by the detail – the minor chord story, if you like. Joe Strummer had just come off the stage at Shea Stadium, and more recently they’d played to 200,000 people at the Us Festival. [In Spain] he took on a local band. I was very interested to find out how that affected them and how they dealt with that, because he’s a superstar at this point, and they were struggling to subsist on the local circuit. I suppose apart from the car presenting itself as a narrative thread, Joe’s search for renewed energy – he wanted to get close to a young, creative, ambitious band with a bit of fire in the stomach, because he probably felt at this point that the Clash weren’t going any further.

When did you start researching this?

I started seeing, after Joe had died, online forums and message boards and these things for rock ‘n’ roll fans over here, and they starting sharing their experiences and anecdotes. Some of them were great. I realized that some of these people had spent a lot of time with Joe Strummer. He spent months on end here; over a year and a half period he was here more than he was back in London. That’s when I started investigating. There was one guy particularly, he’s a journalist, he spoke a lot about his relationship with Joe. So I got in touch with him, and he put me in touch with other people, and so it snowballed from there. It was always, well, if I can’t quite find the structure, or if there isn’t a film in it, it’s gonna be good fun talking to these people.

Before [the Clash] he lived in a squat with two sisters from Malaga. He had a girlfriend from Malaga [Paloma Romero], who went on to become the drummer from the Slits. That is the connection. Richard Dudanski, who was his big friend, they had a Romero sister each, and they all traveled to Malaga in ’73 or something. They’d talk about Lorca. [Dictator Francisco] Franco was still in charge then. He was very interested by Spanish culture and politics. “Spanish Bombs” would have come out of that. And once the Clash was falling apart and he needed to run somewhere, he went back.

There’s an interesting guy in all this, he’s a doctor, a GP in Spain, in Granada. It was his sisters-in-law that were living in the squat – they were taking refuge from the [Franco] dictatorship. And there were Chileans in there. Everyone’s sort of on the run from terrible regimes, meeting in the squat land in ’70s London. This guy who’s now a doctor, he was studying medicine and he went over to see his sisters-in-law and ended up staying in the squat and becoming friends with Joe. He tells stories which aren’t relevant to my story, to what I’m doing, but he ended up sharing a room with Sid Vicious as well, as the whole punk scene was taking off, and one night he had to sew Sid’s hand up because he’d cut it on a bottle or something.

Nick Hall

Probably many, many people in London can tell that same story.

[Laughs] Probably, yeah. A weekly occurrence. Anyway, that was how the [Spain] connection came up. It was quite direct. It wasn’t chance.

It’s interesting to think about Strummer spending so much of that time in close contact with people from Franco’s Spain and Chile. That clearly informed the songwriting he did.

It comes out, repeatedly. One of the attractions of Joe Strummer is that – I mean, I never met the guy, it’s all supposition – but he genuinely cared, you know? As genuinely as possible with a guy trying to live his own life. There is that feeling that he’d hear these stories, staying up late, from his Chilean friends, his Spanish friends, and once he’s in a band thinks, “Fuck, maybe I can raise awareness, change something.” And then of course everybody expects too much, because it’s so powerful on stage and the songs are so great. So he has to kind of back down – “Listen, it’s just four guys doing what we can. You have to make your own way.” But I would say there’s no doubt that he did have quite an international vision.

It ran both ways. The Clash were hugely popular in Spain.

Well, he sang about Spain. Can you imagine? Spain wasn’t on the map them, in terms of British-American rock music. And there’s only so much flamenco and copla a young person can take [laughs]. Young Spanish people were listening to what everybody was listening to. There was a punk movement. The bands that were coming out of the young crowd were influenced by the British bands more than anything, and for one of them – one of the most important – to be singing about Spain, that would be massive. They only played three gigs in Spain, ever, but it feels like they were always much closer to Spain. Those three gigs left a mark.